Tag Archives: 4.1

Efflorescence has been redesigned. It creates a healing zone at the feet of a Swiftmend target, but this healing zone now restores health equal to 4/8/12% of the amount healed by Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every 1 second for 7 seconds. This periodic effect now also benefits from spell haste, but the individual ticks cannot be critical effects.

Efflorescence has a new spell effect.

This redesign changes the Efflorescence from healing a small amount for everyone in it, to a smart heal that will heal the most injured for more. If there’s anyone out there who still believes the change is a nerf, here’s some napkin math. Assuming that Swiftmend heals for 15,000:

Old Efflorescence:
Six people stand in the Efflorescence and receive 30% of the Swiftmend’s healing over 7 seconds. That’s 4500 healing for each person giving a total of 27000 healing done. Not a bad amount, but the ticks will only be healing for 642 per tick. If more than 6 people are standing in the Effloresence, the healing per tick will be even less.

New Efflorescence:
Any number of people stand in the Efflorescence. The three people with the lowest health will receive 12% of the Swiftmend’s healing every second for 7 seconds. Each tick will heal for 1800. That’s 12600 healing for each person giving a total of 37800 healing done. And that’s not all – since Efflorescence is now effected by haste, it will likely be ticking 8 or 9 times rather than 7. Each extra tick adds 5400 healing to the total amount of healing done.

Resto druids have been asking for this change for a while, and Blizzard has listened. At first I was very excited about this change, but after weighing the options it opens up – I don’t think it’s going to make an ounce of difference in my spec or healing. I’ll talk more about this when I give spec options below.

I’ve already voiced my concerns about this change. It’s disappointing that we aren’t getting a new, damage-reducing cooldown but forgetting that for a second, this is a nice change. Being able to use Tranquility 2 or even 3 times a fight will increase our healing output considerably and give us more options during times of heavy raid damage.

Nature’s Swiftness now also increases the healing done by the affected nature spell by 50%.

While this is a buff, it’s not very impressive. It’s not enough of a boost to convince me to pick up NS in my spec, but it is a nice little bonus for those who already spec into NS and use it regularly.

Druids now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Tranquility.

A small buff, but a useful one. Now we no longer have to save Barkskin for our Tranquility channel and can use it during more damage-heavy times instead.

Specs

This spec has zero points in Moonglow or Furor, so you really need to have the appropriate gear, raid buffs and consumables to use this spec. This spec will put out the most HPS but will be hard to sustain. Why have I put 3 points into Living Seed even though it’s been unlinked from Efflorescence? Why not put those points in Blessing of the Grove instead? Based on my Regrowth usage (I use it for almost all OoC procs) and crit chance, LS will provide ~50% more HPS per point than Blessing of the Grove. BotG is a really underwhelming talent.

This is a much safer spec. You get all three points in Moonglow and 2 in Furor – you’ll be able to sustain casting for much longer. In addition, there are two points in Perseverance, which will help keep you alive. If you like the look of the improved Nature’s Swiftness you can take a point away from Perseverance or Nature’s Bounty to get it.

If you want something in-between, play around with the optional talent points. For example, you could take the two points out of Furor and put them in Genesis.

A new set of patch notes from the 4.1 PTR were posted last night (Source). There were a few interesting changes for resto druids included. Obviously, nothing is final, and everything is subject to change, but I thought I’d toss in my 2 cents about the changes.

Lifebloom’s bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. In addition, it now costs 11% of base mana, up from 7%.

No one likes nerfs, but I’m not overly concerned about this change. 11% base mana is still not very much and I generally consider the ‘bloom’ from Lifebloom a secondary effect. The one place this will have a real impact is when we are in ToL – currently Lifebloom spam is a great source of raid healing and OoC procs. We’ll have to be a little more careful now. When we aren’t in ToL, I don’t think this change will be too noticable especially if you generally refresh your Lifebloom stacks with direct heals (like I do) and don’t let the stack bloom very often.

Edit (Mar. 2):

We’re a bit worried about Resto being too powerful in PvP. We wanted to try out the Lifebloom changes to see if it fixed the problem. We don’t think it’s quite the right change though, so we’re going to revert the Lifebloom mana nerf, but keep the reduced bloom effect. We’ll have to keep watching this. (Source)

And like that, it was gone.

Also, an Effloresence change will be forthcoming:

The change to Efflorescence becoming a smart heal was actually originally just a bug. Since so many of you responded so favorably to it though, we’re actually going to redesign Efflorescence to work similarly. We expect the redesign to help the talent be more useful in 5 and 10 player content as well. We’ll have more details at a later time.

This is good news. Though Efflorescence can provide a good ~8% of my healing on some fights, the mechanic could definitely use some improvement so that the healing it provides is more meaningful. I look forward to getting more details on this.

While this sounds like a fantastic buff…I have a bad feeling about this. Being able to use Tranquility every 3 minutes sounds great, but if the healing output stays the same, this will be way, way overpowered. My biggest fear is that the healing will be reduced to compensate for that, and that would suck. I’d rather Tranquility be an awesome, high-output spell usable once a fight than a mediocre spell usable more often. I’d really hate for the healing to become lackluster, like Divine Hymn. Of course I may be overreacting, planning for a nerf before this even goes live, but I can’t imagine this kind of buff sticking around for long.

Also, the wording on this is very strange. It’s supposed to be part of resto specialization but it’s worded like a talent, with multiple reduction levels. I don’t think this is quite complete.

I actually prefer the current one, but this will make it easier to see bad stuff on the ground, especially when healing effects are stacked up.

There are also some interesting non-druid changes on the horizon.

Death Knight – Raise Ally has been redesigned to be a battle resurrection, analogous to Rebirth. It is instant cast, but costs 50 Runic Power to use, and has a 10-minute cooldown. It shares the same global battle resurrection cap with Rebirth and Soulstone.

DKs are creeping onto our combat rez turf. I propose a West Side Story style dance-off to solve this.

User Interface – Like the Focus Frame, the character Unit and Target Frames can now be unlocked and moved to one’s content.

I doubt I’ll ever go back to the default unit frames, but this is an excellent change for those who like to stay relatively mod-free. I have to say, the top left corner of the screen is a really stupid place for health bars. I’m surprised this took so long.